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For breakfast this morning, I ate 250 calories, 16 grams of fat, 15 grams of sugar, 8 grams of protein and fruit polyphenols. More specifically? A green apple slathered with natural peanut butter.

We don't eat just nutrients. We eat food. But we often focus on nutrients as a measure of the healthfulness of our diet, which is misguided, says Gyorgy Scrinis, author of “Nutritionism: The Science and Politics of Dietary Advice” (Columbia University Press, $32.95).

Scrinis argues that this common approach to nutrition, which he calls “nutritionism,” is oversimplified and distorts our evaluation of food quality. He writes that knowledge of certain nutrients tends to be exaggerated and taken out of context, particularly when it's communicated to the public.

Scrinis proposes an alternative paradigm to understand food quality, which primarily emphasizes the level of processing in food production.

I spoke to Scrinis, who teaches food politics at the University of Melbourne in Australia, by phone. Excerpts from our conversation:

Q: What is your criticism of the Nutrition Facts label in the United States?

A: It's just focusing on the nutrients, and only some of the nutrients. That gets further simplified on the front of a food package, where particular nutrients are plucked out by the food industry to market their foods, highlight the beneficial nutrients in their foods, one or two of them, or which supposedly harmful nutrients have been removed, such as fat. Just focusing on the nutrient profile, such as whether a food is low-fat or high in omega-3s or high in calcium, doesn't really tell us all we need to know about a food. Really I think it's the ingredients we should be focusing on, but even the ingredients list itself doesn't really tell us a lot about how processed each of the ingredients are.

A: There's nothing wrong with telling people to be conscious of some of the nutrients in their foods and some of the knowledge that we have of the benefits or harmfulness of these particular food components. It's where that knowledge gets taken out of context and simplified that we're running into problems. So fiber might be good, and we find fiber in a whole range of whole foods, and eaten in that form, the evidence seems to suggest it's quite a healthful property in food. But we take that knowledge and perhaps exaggerate the benefits of fiber, attribute to it a whole range of beneficial effects, and then, of course, that gets exaggerated when we try to seek out fiber in its pure form or foods with added fiber.

Q: How does the margarine vs. butter situation exemplify nutritionism?

A: Margarine is one of the few highly processed foods that we eat that nutrition experts promote as being healthy. That's because of this incredibly simplified and reductive interpretation of fat and so-called good and bad fats. Nutrition experts since the '60s have been promoting margarine over a minimally processed food such as butter. That really ignored the processing margarine was going through in order to solidify the vegetable oils in order to make the margarine and ignored the way the polyunsaturated fats were being transformed into trans fats. It wasn't until the 1990s these studies came out showing the harmfulness of trans fats. But even since then we've sort of kept our focus on the fat content of these products rather than how highly processed they are. The margarine manufacturers have responded by changing their processing techniques to get the trans fats out.